Naiana Magalhães

Fortaleza, Brazil, 1986.
Lives and works in Fortaleza, Brazil.

PIPA 2016 nominee.

Visual artist born in Fortaleza, Ceará, graduated in Visual Arts School at the University of Fortaleza (2012) and was a student at the Visual Arts Laboratory from Vila das Artes in Fortaleza, Brazil (2012). Studied at Parque Lage School of Visual Arts (2013-2014). In 2015 participated in an artistic residency at La Chambre Blanche in Quebec, Canada, in partnership with LabMIS-SP; was selected for the 66o Salão de Abril in Fortaleza, Brazil and for the 10th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Master’s student at the Postgraduate Arts Programme of the Federal University of Ceará. Lives and works in Fortaleza, Brazil.

Colonial Coffee is instigating. There is an aesthetic pleasure on the visuality of the milk and coffee color tones that merge over the skin. The disposition of the table towel and the cup brings up the atmosphere from which the title of the work inspires. But not only color and pictoriality is what this video provides and seduces us for, but it’s images brings an intensity of cultural, political and Brazilian history. The historical relation of milk and coffee, the fight over the economic control between the states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo, our culture fuzed in black and white skin colors, generators of many other intermediary tones. Naiana’s videos are short and simple, which I see it as something good.

Naiana Magalhães presents rare comprehension of the moving image, creating films where everyday and familiar situations become apart from the triviality in order to acquire an enigmatic content. Visual artist graduated at Visual Arts School from University of Fortaleza (2012); student at the Visual Arts Laboratory from Vila das Artes in Fortaleza, Brazil (2012) also at the Parque Lage Visual Art School (2013- 2014) in Rio de Janeiro and currently master’s student at the Postgraduate Program in Arts of the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil, the artist appropriates the camera to record slant observations, skewed through the door’s and window’s cracks. In another way, overtakes the distant observation, to the point of her omission facing the narrative’s characters. Naiana uses a sort of ironic and surrealist tone, for she points out from several and repetitive facts the absurdity of the human behavior. In front of the doors of the female bathroom cabins, the artist records the agitated movements offering us the cropped view by half of the floor, where legs highlighted only by the ankles and feet comes and goes. The noisy transit makes the conversations and chats subject to unusual humor. The narrative is lively noted by the framing of the image, as it is also by it’s cuts. At the end, one of the characters realize that there is a furtive, indiscreet camera and the video ends before it reveals the persona’s face. It becomes quite commendable to perceive the strength of those images and it’s insertion, in a context that could only provide attributive sensations, such as curiosity, fetishism, for being about the endless purposes of the work of art.